next »

[s-spooky g-g-ghosts]

Looks great, this game will definitely be something

[coremission]

Nice, but animation for diving suit is weird. It looks like horse riding. I think it will be better with smooth walking

[bombjack]

I like a lot the blurred front pipes.
It gives a lot of depth to the scene.

[s-spooky g-g-ghosts]

Nice, but animation for diving suit is weird. It looks like horse riding. I think it will be better with smooth walking

You mean trotting/gallop I suppose. I must agree, a typical walk in a suit resembles more of walking like a penguin or with a dump in your pants.

[Skippi]

In the Shadows is a platformer game with puzzles involving shadow creature, amongst other things, interaction with lights and environement. "In The Shadows" is the working title for now.

Still figuring out some gameplay elements and trying to tie together the story, it involve in part interacting with the creatures in different situations involving lights and shadow. The creatures of the night are nothing but inert objects in light, but come to life in the shadow, in a childish, kid like imaginary way. There will be some puzzles, but I don't think anything too challenging, i'm still trying to balance the pace of the levels.

My inspirations are obvious I think, but I do have a sweet spot for the old SMB2 and the weird mood it had. It affected me greatly in a way, back then, being so different from any other of the serie, I am taking some gameplay elements from it with a twist.

Here are some gifs I posted on screenshot saterday

Simple exemple of creature interaction.


Some experiments with weather.


Foreground experiment.

Here some monster animations

Lots of stuff is in development, animation are still being worked on, game play elements, look and feel. This is still very early in development.


I'll try to posts updates regularly : )

Congrats. Man, This Game Rulez!

[nt]

Nice, but animation for diving suit is weird. It looks like horse riding. I think it will be better with smooth walking

You mean trotting/gallop I suppose. I must agree, a typical walk in a suit resembles more of walking like a penguin or with a dump in your pants.

I'm trying to reuse the same basic walk for the different suits, might not be the best tho, maybe I'll revisit this walk cycle at some point

Congrats. Man, This Game Rulez!

It's not so much a game at this point but thanks! I'm working a lot on visual right now, making interesting levels is a lot of work, I hope to show actual gameplay soon.

[s-spooky g-g-ghosts]

I'm trying to reuse the same basic walk for the different suits, might not be the best tho, maybe I'll revisit this walk cycle at some point

Yeah man, don't trouble yourself too much. After all everything's acceptable in pixel art. What I tell myself when people make such comments on my stuff is that "I can't make things worse, I can only improve them". One day you could just try to create an alternative walk cycle and decide which one's better. It's not that big of a deal.

[atmos]

Now that is some coo looking pixel art. I want more!

[nt]

Not much visual to show this week, I'm working on rewriting the whole player controls, it was a prototype before and a bit sloppy, it's a whole lot better now.

I did try something a bit different for the ladder climbing tho, since a couple people pointed out the weird face illusion with the hair cut on the back of the head, also getting on the ladder feels better with a transition.

[Derity]

Looks like we have a replacement for Fez 2, haha.

Beautiful art. 

[LightEnt]

Yes, this does remind me of Fez alot. It's very eye catching.

On a completely unrelated note how on earth do you people capture smooth GIFs

[nt]

Looks like we have a replacement for Fez 2, haha.

Beautiful art. 

Thanks, yeah Fez is an obvious influence. Somehow I always pictured Fez 2 would be kinda 3D vector looking tho, with colors, instead of pixel art. Might be because of the teaser.

Yes, this does remind me of Fez alot. It's very eye catching.

On a completely unrelated note how on earth do you people capture smooth GIFs

I use Gifcam mostly, or ScreenToGif, but there is always some visual artifacts with both. 30fps Gifs are huge files also.

[quietCoder]

This game is looking really good. The depth of field and rain effects are sweet.

[nt]

The last two weeks have been busy. I did a complete rewrite of the player control and it feels a lot better now, moving the character around, climbing ladder and stuff. I also fixed a couple of weird things with the animation, while I think there is still some work to be done, like the way he falls in water.

I'm trying to finish a teaser for the game, a title change will follow, probably, then I hope to show some actual gameplay on another trailer, 2 or 3 weeks after that.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make trees that would fit with the style, I think this works pretty well : )

new fall in water animation :


trees!

[GrahamOfLegend]

I'd just like to let you know that this game is absolutely beautiful and I can not wait to see more / play it! The Fez influence is clear, and it is very welcomed. Keep up the awesome work nt! 

[nt]

Trying some stuff to give some atmosphere. I might use this in some situations

click for fullsize!






I'm also writing something to get multi-plane backgrounds. I didn't think it would work with the style but since trying out the blurred foreground I can see how having the background multi level can give a lot more depth. So there will be multi level of objects in the background when the environment permits it, and an image in the far which will be the last depth level. It's gonna be more work to add this to already made levels but I think it's for the better.

I guess defining visual while at the same time programming mechanics and making levels, I am bound to have to redo stuff a lot.

[dotsquid]

The art is looking awesome.
What engine are you using?

[nt]

The art is looking awesome.
What engine are you using?

Thanks! I'm currently using Unity as the engine.

While I'm at it, since this is a developer log, if anyone is interested, most of the pixel art is done in PyxelEdit, which is so cheap, then I bring everything in Qubicle to voxelise it and import it in Unity.

So most of the stuff is done like this:


So it gives me some depth to light it in Unity. Some stuff is still only sprite tho, like the player and enemies, also water and other things that don't need depth.


Sadly with the Cubicle Unity plugin right now, the mesh are hardly optimized, lots of waste of triangles. For now I don't really see any performance impact, Lots of the stuff is static and get batched, and since I use so little texture, it's not very memory hungry. Even in heavy scene the frame rate go all the way to 150fps so I might have to limit it.

[dotsquid]

Hmm.. interesting. I thought everything is 2d, since there is no parallax on the animated gifs. It means you are using the orthographic projection, aren't you? If so, haven't you tried the perspective one? (for the whole game, not for the last screenshot)

[kruxus]

I think faking the parallax by offsetting each layer like you'd do in 2d would work better.

That's a cool technique you got there! Have you thought about using 3d space for any gameplay mechanics?